Iran Occupational Health

Background and aims: Risk assessment is the most important function in the Risk management Process. Because the lack of existing a general methodology in this filed, organizations prefer to use simple approaches. These approaches are not capable of presenting an accurate ranking of dangers. The aim of this paper was to overcome the existing limitation of the simple approaches.

 Methods: The presented methodology used multi-attribute group decision making (MAGDM) technique based on fuzzy set theory. In this paper nominal group technique (NGT) and FUZZY TOPSIS are utilized in order to determine evaluation criteria and rank hazards, respectively. A typical job, first by William Fine method are evaluated and then by the proposed approach will be re-evaluated.

 Results: Evaluation criteria developed by NGT are: severity, probability, exposure, protective measure, preventive measures and failure to detect risk. The psychological stress risk was scored with 3th rank in the William Fine’s method while in the new method it was ranked at First.

 Conclusion: Results indicate that the proposed method provide an effective methodology for risk evaluation. This methodology reveals the hazards that was viewed as the unimportant hazards in simple methods. As the result of changes which were made in the risk ranking, management decisions was changed.